It’s official: Apple is buying Beats Electronics for $3 billion. Mashable & Gigaom. Part of the deal will be Beats Music,which launched as a Spotify competitor earlier this year. It will be announced, you guessed it, at the Code Conference. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine will join Apple. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, told the NYT “These guys are really unique,” Mr. Cook said. “It’s like finding the precise grain of sand on the beach. They’re rare and very hard to find.”

TechCrunch reports on a new $199 3-D printer called the MOD-t designed by Frog Design and backed by Idealab. The low entry level price gets you a minimum layer height of .02 mm and the ability to print using the starch-based plastic, PLA. The printer is small and the printing plate moves under the stationary head reducing some complexity though printing slowly. Backers of the Indiegogo for the printer can get the model even cheaper for $149.

I have been using Bossjock Studio for IOS for about a year now. It is a really nice podcasting app that allows you to mix in music and such as well as export files as mp3 or AACs to various platforms. You can email the files, transfer them to your computer and ftp them to many places. It is a great mobile podcasting platform and I use it a lot with my son for his podcast, the Jonathan Files.